GOOD FOR WHAT AILS YOU Music of the Medicine Shows 1926 - 1937 OLD HAT CD 1005

NOMINATED FOR 2 GRAMMY AWARDS - Best Album Notes & Best Historical Album

“If you want to hear some of the range of music that could be heard on medicine shows, there’s a compilation called Good For What Ails You. I got nothing against downloads and MP3s, but getting this CD with all the pictures and liner notes,
well, it’s not as good as having it on the big 12” record, but at least there’s a booklet there, and believe it or not, folks,
you can even read it in a power failure- as long as it’s daytime.” —Bob Dylan,Theme Time Radio Hour

Before motion pictures... before radio... before television... the traveling medicine shows brought entertainment to America. Flamboyant pitch doctors roamed the land, hawking their tonics, elixirs, and miracle cures, and with them came a host of singers, dancers, comedians, banjo pickers, blues shouters, jug blowers, string ticklers, and minstrel men. The shows died out by mid-20th century, but not before a handful of seasoned veterans left their musical legacy on phonograph records. Here are 48 classic performances by such colorful names as Pink Anderson, Daddy Stovepipe, Shorty Godwin, Gid Tanner, Banjo Joe, the Three Tobacco Tags, and many more—well over two hours of this extraordinary music. A 72-page color booklet details the fascinating history of the medicine shows with a profusion of rare photographs, artifacts, illustrations, full discography, and song descriptions. Three years in the making, the new release from Old Hat Records is a groundbreaking survey of music from the American medicine show, that peculiar form of theater that merged entertainment with merchandising. Good For What Ails You is a two-CD set that delivers a generous mix of 48 songs, many available nowhere else, first recorded nearly 80 years ago and now remastered with digital clarity.

Good For What Ails You was nominated for two Grammy Awards: Best Album Notes and Best Histornical Album.

“Like Harry Smith’s Anthology of American Folk Music, these 48 tracks provide a fine introduction to what Greil Marcus called ‘the old, weird America.’ If nothing else, such a cornucopia of delights will cure the modern day blues.” –Casper Llewellyn Smith, Guardian Unlimited,
July 16, 2006

“Factor in assorted skillet lickers, jug stompers, fruit jar drinkers, ramblers, crackers, tarheels and tobacco tags, and you have a buried history of vernacular music, therapeutic culture and politics second to none. Recommended; or rather, prescribed.” –Brian Morton, The Wire, November 2005

“When you go out on tour and play with different bands every day, or you play in bars all the time, your tastes start to become very selective... What I’m listening to most of the time at present is an album called Good For What Ails You, which is an album of songs that people used to listen to at medicine shows all over the States. It’s quite an interesting album and I think that people would be well advised to pick it up.” –Jack White, White Stripes, December 2005